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Groundwork Environment Reader: What Now? Environmental Readings Volume 2: What Now? Published by: Groundwork Education www.layinggroundwork.org Compiled & Edited by Jeff Wagner with help from Micaela Petrini, Sarah Messner, & Chris Hoffman First Edition, June 2018 This work is comprised of articles and excerpts from numerous sources. Groundwork and the editors do not own the material or claim copyright or rights to this material, unless written by one of the editors. This work is distributed as a compilation of educational materials for the sole use as non-commercial educational material for educators. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to edit and share this work in non-commercial ways. Any published derivative works must credit the original creator and maintain this same Creative Commons license. Please notify us of any derivative works or edits. food, no life that is not somebody's death. Some would take this as a sign that the universe is Environmental Readings Volume 2: fundamentally flawed. This leads to a disgust with self, with humanity, and with nature. What Now? Otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage to the planet (and human psyches) than Published by Groundwork Education, compiled & edited by Jeff Wagner the pain and suffering that is in the existential conditions they seek to transcend. The archaic religion is to kill god and eat him. Or her. The shimmering food-chain, the food-web, is the scary, beautiful condition of the biosphere. Subsistence people live without Economic Nature by Jack Turner ............................................................................1 excuses. The blood is on your own hands as you divide the liver from the gallbladder. You have Turner, a philosophy professor turned Tetons climbing guide, addresses head-on one of watched the color fade on the glimmer of the trout. A subsistence economy is a sacramental the big questions avoided in most environmental talk: are economics and economy because it has faced up to one of the critical problems of life and death: the taking of life environmentalism compatible? for food. Contemporary people do not need to hunt, many cannot even afford meat, and in the developed world the variety of foods available to us makes the avoidance of meat an easy choice. The Pleasure of Eating by Wendell Berry ..............................................................10 Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more What can city people do about the issues facing global food systems? ignorant. Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our hearts and guides the children and Forget Shorter Showers by Derrick Jensen ...........................................................13 welcomes the guest, all at the same time. We look at eggs, apples, and stew. They are evidence of Environmentally-minded people spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying and plenitude, excess, a great reproductive exuberance. Millions of grains of grass-seed that will feeling guitly about personal consumption. Shorter showers, like many actions we spend become rice or flour, millions of codfish fry that will never, and must never, grow to maturity. energy thinking about, are a drop in the ocean of resource use. Does changing personal Innumerable little seeds are sacrifices to the food-chain. A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of consumption make a difference for the natural world? How should we spending our time living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from earth, air, water. and energy? And if we do eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with foursquare feet and a huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive The Gift of Strawberries by Robin Wall Kimmerer ................................................15 ourselves. We too will be offerings—we are all edible. And if we are not devoured quickly, we are big A Potawatami perspective on how to treat the things we take from the Earth. enough (like the old down trees) to provide a long slow meal to the smaller critters. Whale Where Is The Fiction About Climate Change? by Amitav Ghosh ............................19 carcasses that sink several miles deep in the ocean feed organisms in the dark for fifteen years. (It seems to take about two thousand to exhaust the nutrients in a high civilization.) Ghosh asks us to examine our collective imagination and language about climate change At our house we say a Buddhist grace— and what unknowns the future might hold. Why are there so few pieces of literature being written about the climate crisis? We venerate the Three Treasures [teachers, the wild, and friends] And are thankful for this meal Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein ...........................................................23 The work of many people And the sharing of other forms of life. This article was later expanded into the most comprehensive books on the implications of climate change for the world and the hard choices it presents us with as modern humans. Anyone can use a grace from their own tradition (and really give it meaning)—or make up their own. Saying some sort of grace is never inappropriate, and speeches and announcements Kneel at the Feet of the Mother of the Food You Eat and Ask Her to Adopt You by can be tacked onto it. It is a plain, ordinary, old-fashioned little thing to do that connects us with Martín Prechtel .................................................................................................35 all our ancestors. An eloquent sprouting of ideas from indigenous cultures planted in the soil of modernity, A monk asked Dong-shan: “Is there a practice for people to follow?” Dong-shan answered: sprouting like a seed and offering a path forward to develop a true connection with the “When you become a real person, there is such a practice.” world that feeds us. Sarvamangalam, Good Luck to All. Reinhabitation by Gary Snyder ............................................................................38 Is it possible to re-develop an earth-based culture out of modern society? The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono ..........................................................41 A heartwarming story about living a truly beautiful life for the benefit of the Earth and the benefit of others. Survival and Sacrament by Gary Snyder ...............................................................45 “These superstitious-sounding old ritual formulas are never mentioned in lectures, but they are at the heart of the teaching. Their import is older than Buddhism or any of the world religions. They are part of the first and last practice of the wild: Grace.” "49 rooted in the primitive and the paleolithic—our body is a vertebrate mammal being—and our souls are out in the wilderness. Economic Nature by Jack Turner Turner, a philosophy professor turned Tetons climbing guide, addresses head-on one of the big questions avoided in most environmental talk: are economics and environmentalism compatible? All together elsewhere, vast Chapter 4 from The Abstract Wild, 1996 Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, The conservation movement is, at the very least, an assertion that these interactions between Silently and very fast. man and land are too important to be left to chance, even that sacred variety of chance known W. H. Auden, as economic law.—Aldo Leopold from “The Fall of Rome” • We live surrounded by scars and loss. Each of us carries around a list of particular offenses Grace against our place: a clear-cut, an over-grazed meadow, a road, a dam. Some we grudgingly accept There is a verse chanted by Zen Buddhists called the “Four Great Vows.” The first line goes: as necessary, others we judge mistakes. The mistakes haunt us like demons, the demons spawn “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” Shujomuhen seigando. It's a bit daunting avenging spirits, and the presence of demons and spirits helps make a place our home. It is not to announce this intention—aloud—to the universe daily. This vow stalked me for several years accidental that “home” and “haunt” share deep roots in Old English, that we speak of the home of and finally pounced: I realized that I had vowed to let the sentient beings save me. In a similar an animal as its haunt, or that “haunt” can mean both a place of regular habitation and a place way, the precept against taking life, against causing harm, doesn't stop in the negative. It is marked by the presence of spirits. Like scars, the spirits are reminders - traces by which the past urging us to give life, to undo harm. remains present. Those who attain some ultimate understanding of these things are called “Buddhas,” which Forty years ago big cutthroats cruised the Gros Ventre River of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. means “awakened ones.” The word is connected to the English verb “to bud.” I once wrote a little Now, in late summer, dust blows up the river bed. It's as dry as an arroyo in Death Valley, a dead parable: river drained by ranchers. Each autumn much of Jackson Lake, the jewel of Grand Teton Who the Buddhas Are National Park, is a mud flat baking in the sun, its waters drained to irrigate potatoes. Without All the beings of the universe are already realized. That is, with the exception of one good snowfalls each winter the lake could disappear and with it the big browns, and with those or two beings. In those rare cases the cities, villages, meadows, and forests, with all their browns, Gerard Manley Hopkins' “rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim."1 The western birds, flowers, animals, rivers, trees, and humans, that surround such a person, all border of Yellowstone National Park can be seen from outer space, a straight line cut through a collaborate to educate, serve, challenge, and instruct such a one, until that person also once fine forest by decades of clearcutting.
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